Weeknotes 52

A whole year of weeknotes! They said it couldn’t be done.

Schneems asking some interesting questions about the future of Ruby. First we couldn’t scale, now we’re dead – shame, really.

GitHub released Co-Pilot this week. Maybe I’m naive, but I didn’t realise it would be a paid-for service. And that does change my feelings about it somewhat.

Nice post from Bannerbear about the technical mistakes they’ve made along the way to a successful business.

For example, I didn’t lean on any shiny new technology, I just used the tech that I know best: Ruby on Rails.

I agree with this point, if you want to build a business you should probably use the technology you know really well. For side projects I’ve often decided to use technology that I don’t know well, and then get frustrated when I can’t do something simple.

Do. It. Yourself. My powers (and confidence) grows.

I don’t totally understand this.

Omg, is this for real??? Apple dropped the bitcode requirement for iOS!

But, it seems that Apple’s decision to change their policy will allow software written in Rust to be distributed on the App Store, and run on Apple devices – which is cool.

Nice to see the Rubygems team tackling software supply chain security with MFA. The approach is pragmatic too – starting with the packages most likely to be attacked.

Starting today (June 13, 2022), the maintainers of at least the top 100 RubyGems packages will begin to see warnings on the RubyGems command-line tool and website if MFA is not enabled on their accounts. Anybody who maintains a gem with more than 165 million downloads will see this recommendation.

This week I learnt that you can supply a block to RSpec’s raise_error which allows you to set expectations on the error raised. I used this to test a custom exception class.

expect {
  Foo::Bar.call
}.to raise_error { |error|
  expect(error).to be_a(SomeErrorClass)
  expect(error.message).to match(/some message/)
  expect(error.context).to include(/some context/)
}

I’ve been using Pop for pairing this week. It works pretty well. Low latency, and very responsive. But it would be better if the UI would stay out of the way a bit more. That’s something I like about Tuple, it just sits in the macOS menu bar.

Brighton Ruby is back next week – it feels like a long time since I was last in Brighton for the conference. Like pretty much everything I ever book, I can’t really be bothered to go, but I suspect I will have a good time once I get there. Hopefully the trains run!